The Mercenary

"[...]woman who had proud eyes, that he felt at being her protector in this old garrisoned city that was strange to both of them. "No, lady!" He spoke truth, and she knew it. "It is like this!" she said, and pointed downwards. "It is dark and in movement, and you see stars in it glittering,—wavy stars that you know are not real, though they look so near. You know that it would be cold to plunge in, and that you would not get your stars. There are the stars above in the blue at an immense distance.... It's like that too!" She pointed up the waterway into the darkness. "You can see a little of the way, and then it is all dark, all a mystery, and yet you know that you are eager to go, and that if you go far enough you will expect to reach the stars." Nigel listened and was troubled—troubled because he was not by nature a poet, and could not well follow her thought, and troubled because he felt that her note was impersonal as relating to himself. If she was referring to a particular man it was not himself. "To think," she went on, "that a woman could be so stirred, so set above herself by any man that she would become even as his slave in[...]".